Thursday, September 8, 2016

Autobobography IX—Highlands

I’m in Boston town, in some
restaurantI got no idea what I wantWell, maybe I do but I’m just really not sure

One last place piece. I grew up in the
eastern megalopolis, but in a small town that at the time couldn’t have even been
called a suburb. The earliest Boston experience I remember involved going to a
medical center for testing to see what I was allergic to—really, it was more a
question of what I wasn’t allergic to. The procedure was nothing traumatic and
what I really remember is going to a nearby diner with my father afterward and
having beef stew, blueberry pie, and a glass of milk.

My other early Boston memories came
about because my grandfather knew someone in professional baseball. In 1967,
the Impossible Dream year for the Red Sox, I met one of the pitchers who took
my program back to the locker room and returned it with autographs from most of
the team, the longest and biggest being Carl Yastrzemski. At a game the
following year I got a baseball autographed by the Minnesota Twins.

Twenty years later I was working for a
financial corporation which had private boxes at Fenway and Boston Garden and I
was able to see Sox and Celtics games that way. At the Red Sox game, a foul
ball flew past us into the room where some of our group was watching the game
on television. My only other fond memory of those corporate years is when I
told one of the people working for me to take as much time off as she needed
after her pet died.

During the fifteen years I lived in or
around Boston, I attended hundreds if not thousands of movies, concerts, plays,
dance performances, museum exhibits, and lectures including hearing Gary
Snyder. I took adult education classes in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, as
well as through Harvard Extension School in subjects including writing, nature,
tai chi, and many more.

I took frequent train trips west to
Walden Pond, north to Rockport, south to a large Audubon hiking area, and boats
east to watch the humpbacks. I walked and ran through all the parks in Boston’s
Emerald Necklace. One regular routine was to take a couple subway lines to hang
out in Harvard Square on Saturday nights and buy an early copy of Sunday’s
Boston Globe. Another was trying new restaurants with two coworkers, women from
Italy and Trinidad (much more interesting than Americans).

It was a good life in a city I loved. Even
with outrageous Boston rents, I was saving money while working less than forty
hours a week. Eventually though, all the opportunities stopped interesting me,
and even though offered a leave of absence by the college where I’d worked for
ten years, I knew it was time to move away from the area permanently, a move
I’ve never regretted despite still considering Boston one of my favorite cities.

I’ve written more than enough about
Yellowstone in the four years I lived there and since, but I have to include
the Rockies in these place pieces, especially in one titled Highlands. Waiting
for the bus in Minneapolis on my first trip there, I met a woman in line who
lived in my destination Bozeman and we talked much of the way across the
country. When the first snow covered mountains—the Crazies—came into view, she
said this is why we live here.

The views were sensational, but the
wildlife was the reason I lived in Yellowstone for four years. Wildlife as it
should be, large and free, with humans just one part of the landscape instead
of the only part. In theory in the park, humans weren’t allowed to treat the
natural world with the contempt they show in most of the world, but assholes
are assholes and can’t always be controlled. People have been damaging
Yellowstone’s features and killing its wildlife ever since it was created.

Watching that behavior got to be a
drag, and I think I got out just in time before it got even worse with increased
visitation. Despite that pain, what ultimately drove me from Yellowstone was
feeling betrayed and disappointed by people I knew and the company I worked
for. I’ll never go back unless there are major changes in how tourists are
dealt with. And even if the tourists are handled better, there’s still a big
chunk of the population of the surrounding states to deal with—the ones who
couldn’t wait, and sometimes didn’t, to kill a wolf and now foam at the mouth
for the chance to kill a grizzly. People—can’t live with them, can’t manage
their population. Wildlife—life without them is a poor substitute.

I had an offer to work in Yellowstone
thirty years earlier than I eventually did. I would have had the chance to
experience all that thirty years earlier, including meeting a woman who started
then who I later worked for when I finally did get to the park. Looking back, I
think the decision to not go to Yellowstone in 1980 might have changed my life
more than any other I’ve made—I don’t exactly regret it, because many
experiences I’ve had and people I’ve known would have been missed in exchange—but
it feels like it would have been more life-changing than the many moves I’ve
made or not made or the two marriages which didn’t happen.